


A Little Reality

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Category: A Little Romance (1979), Before Sunrise (1995)
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-22
Updated: 2011-11-22
Packaged: 2017-10-26 10:07:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Direct epilogue to "A Little Romance"--after Lauren leaves Paris, she grows up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Reality

Alright, so the letter-writing peters out after a while—even extraordinary people like them can’t sustain a relationship like that on nothing, and they’re only thirteen, after all. When Lauren looks back on it, she’ll always be proud they lasted as long as they did. A year and three months is a long time—her last letter from Natalie is dated two months after she left France. She thinks it was probably her own fault, in some ways—Lauren’s mother and Richard split unexpectedly, and both moved out of Texas with little warning. It had been two months since she’d last gotten a letter from Daniel, and she hadn’t thought to send him her new address when she and her mother went east, assuming that anything that came for her would be forwarded. She sometimes wonders, idly, if a letter for her had made it to the house only to find it empty—if a letter had gotten lost in the shuffle.

She goes with a few boys in high school once or twice (she gets a bit more like everyone else, she knows, but she likes to think she’s just protecting the special part—holding it close to her core, where no one can touch it. Richard still asks her how Heidegger is doing when he writes her, but most of the rest of the people in her life don’t know much about the contents of her bookshelf, and she makes sure it stays that way), but nothing important happens. Well, not too important. Chase Richardson asks her one night, shy and sort of sweet, if it’s her first kiss, too. She thinks of bells at sunset and squeezes her eyes closed for a second, feels the wind off the canal and inexpert fingers resting, tentative, on her shoulder. The light at sunset had painted the backs of her eyelids a splendid, gold-tinged red. She shakes her head at him and feels, at seventeen, impossibly old.

She ends up going to Stanford. Her mother and husband number five take her out to celebrate, Italian food, the best they’ve got in Cincinnati. She enjoys it for what it is rather than what it isn’t, and ducks out before dessert to meet her friends for their own celebration. Her mom doesn’t mind—she and Josh are still in the honeymoon phase, and she’s always pleased by the reminder that Lauren has actual friends these days.

Her friend Darcy has somehow managed to convince her older brother, who is in the Navy and disapproves of Darc’s wild ways, to buy them a sixpack. “He says I only get into college for the first time once, and that he wasn’t even sure I’d get that.”

Lauren has never had siblings, not even step-siblings, which is actually kind of unlikely, probability-wise, when you think of how many permutations her family has gone through. The point is that she doesn’t quite understand Darcy and Steve’s dynamic, but Darcy is smiling like mad as they drive out to the lake. They sit and drink on the dock and the longer they sit there, the more restless Lauren feels. They’re celebrating the start of their new lives, and they’re doing it by sitting still—Darcy turns to talk to Anne and Lauren starts unbuttoning her top.

Lauren is standing to shimmy out of her skirt when Anne turns to her, laughing, and asks, “Something you want to tell us, Elle?”

Lauren answers by diving in.

Stanford is wonderful for Lauren. The sun on the palm trees make her feel like she’s been transported to another world. She meets Dave at a party her first week, and he’s charming in an odd, off-center way, secure in his own strangeness. She likes him for it enough to go to the movies with him the next week, and dinner after that, and again, till they’re known as an item. She likes his friends and the view from his dorm room and the way he doubles over sometimes when he laughs.

He is her first, and it’s nice, but she feels off-balance all of the next day, until he meets her outside of her bio lab and tells her he’s got a surprise. He’s seen her signed Robert Redford in the corner of her room, so he takes her out to a theater that’s re-releasing _Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid_. She’s never seen it, so she is surprised—surprised at the sharp prickling in the corners of her eyes when she realizes who’s on-screen. “Do you like it?” Dave asks her, nervous, and before she thinks about it too much, she cocks her fingers into a pistol at him and says, “Bingo.”

They split near the end of the year. Lauren has a sneaking suspicion it’s partly because he wants to be free to see if the girl he loved from afar in high school will give him a chance now that he’s come home from California, but they would have ended sooner or later, anyway. _Butch Cassidy_ was the most romantic gesture he ever made for her, and he hadn’t even known what it meant. It gets kind of messy, though, for all that. She throws his jacket at him, whips it off from where it has been resting across her shoulders and tosses it in his face because if he doesn’t love her, she doesn’t want anything from him. He laughs at her, a cold laugh, and says that the fact that she’s such a damned romantic is part of the problem.

Lauren goes home for the summer, and, she’s not afraid to admit it, later, she sort of hides. She thinks her mother likes her heartbroken—it’s the first time they’ve ever really had anything in common. They stay in and play old French records her mother has been carting around since Paris and toast each other with elaborate cocktails. Josh is on his way out, by now, and for once, Kay doesn’t have anyone new lined up. She says she’d like to try being on her own for once, but the way her eyes go misty when Lauren gets another letter from Richard, every Thursday without fail, tells another story.

By August Lauren starts to get motivated again, excited about school. She starts looking into study abroad programs. She’s kept up with her French, even though it’s been hard without native speakers around to practice with, and the summer’s deluge of Edith Piaf is making her want to see Paris all over again.

She sets it up to study at the Sorbonne for the spring term, and heads back to school in September to take enough psychology courses to understand that when she was thirteen she’d been determined to become a part of an immortal, romantic love as a direct response to her mother’s flightiness. She still thinks it’s a little sad that the most romantic moment of her life happened when she was thirteen but, she thinks, some people never get those moments at all. With that as the alternative, how can Lauren complain that her moment came too soon?

It’s true, she’s been thinking about that summer a lot. She thinks it’s not uncommon, after a break up, to reflect back on your first love, and Daniel is always going to be that, thirteen years old or not. She thinks about the boy who learned English from the movies and made imaginary bets on horse races to prove he could, the boy who ran away to Venice with her just because she wanted him to. She sees him in her mind’s eye, running along behind the car as she drove to the airport, falling further and further behind, jumping up to wave over the hoods of cars, and he could have gotten hit, she realizes now, but at the time she was too busy crying and grinning all at once to do more than mash her face against the rear window of the car until he disappeared.

Paris now is different from how she remembers it, in an indescribable way, and she’s not sure if time has changed it or if she’s changed, but the streets are still laid out like she remembers. She finds favorite places—a café with an open mic where long haired bohemians play quiet songs on acoustic guitar, a newsstand that’s run by an old man with a moustache like Julius’ who calls her ‘ _Cherie_ ’ and keeps the New York Times in stock, doing a booming business with homesick ex-pats.

She even finds a guy who looks like Daniel, though she knows it probably isn’t him—her genius boy, she is sure, wouldn’t end up working in a bakery, especially not one so near to the street where he grew up. She doesn’t go into the bakery, mostly because she wants it to be him, doesn’t want to go a little closer and realize his eyes are too close together or he smiles wrong, that he’s never heard of Humphrey Bogart. She likes to daydream that she’s found him, so she peers in the shop window from across the street.

She’s in the café one day, and the moon-faced blonde girl with the guitar on the little stage this time looks vaguely familiar, like Lauren has maybe seen her there before, but she doesn’t pay her too much attention. One of the nice things about French lyrics, Lauren thinks, is that she can listen to them and understand them if she wants to, but if her mind is somewhere else, they just sort of filter out—sounds that don’t quite register.

Lauren has been reading her assignment for her literature class for long enough that she kind of starts when she realizes the song in the background is now in English, lilting and lightly accented, _“You were for me that night everything I’d always dreamt of in life, but now you’re gone,”_ and she looks up to pay attention.

It’s a short song, and at the end, the singer nods to the room at large and steps back, but Lauren is suddenly seized with the urge to speak to her, stands up and walks over before she even thinks too much about it, just holds out her hand and says, “Bonjour, je m’apelle Lauren,” and then, flustered, switching to English. “That last song—it was lovely. Why was it in English when your others were in French?”

The girl smiles at her, wide and bright and Lauren is probably imagining that she looks a little sad. “Well, it was about an American boy, what else could I do?” and then, “I’m Celine. Are you vacationing here in Paris?”

“Studying,” Lauren tells her. “For the last few months and until June.”

Celine smiles at her. “And I am moving to New York after the summer—come have a coffee with me, Lauren, and tell me how you find my city.”

“It’s lovely,” Lauren tells her a few minutes later, over steaming new cups. “Almost just like I remember it,” and then, hastily, “I lived here when I was young, as well.”

“You must have loved it, to want to come back,” Celine says.

Celine, it turns out, is twenty five and working with several environmental activist groups. She’s dating a communist with a chip on his shoulder, but she doesn’t think it will last—she’s planning on just letting it dissolve when she moves to the states, though, because he’s great in bed and always willing to come to demonstrations with her.

In comparison, Lauren’s own life sounds very dull—she says so, and Celine laughs. “You only say so because you are not dating now, and you’re right not to. Men are pigs.” She says it in a totally matter-of-fact tone, but the spoils it by giggling again.

Lauren laughs with her, but asks, “All men? What about the one you wrote the song for?” she lowers her voice a little, feeling nosy. “Were you in love with him?”

Celine doesn’t laugh at her this time, though Lauren has been half expecting it—Celine doesn’t seem like the type to believe in true love, especially a one true love, not in this century or any other. Celine says, “I might have been—or I might have come to have been. I only knew him for one night, you know.”

It’s a good response, confident and level and Lauren nods. “Are you moving to New York for him?” As soon as she says it, she wishes she hadn’t, bites her tongue and qualifies, “Just because, you know, you said he was American.”

Celine looks far away. she says, “America is a large country, I wouldn’t know where to start,” but it’s not a ‘no.’ She shakes herself after a moment, then says, “But enough about me! Why are you asking, _ma petite_?” And Lauren doesn’t know if she wants to talk about the Brownings, or Julius, or the bells and the Bridge of Sighs, not to this woman who is solid and real, whose life is not the girlish fantasy Lauren stills sees when she tries to picture her own ideal future.

Instead, she finds herself saying, “When we met, he said, ‘Call me Bogie.’” Celine laughs, says, “Because you are a ‘Lauren,’ no?” and Lauren smiles, knows this is someone she can trust with this story.

“Yeah, but I didn’t know what he meant. We were thirteen.”

Somehow, she actually gets to the point where she tells Celine about the bakery boy, which she didn’t mean to do. It’s getting dark outside now, and Lauren is pretty sure she won’t be meeting Michelle for dinner after all, because Celine is looking at her like this silly story she has kept close for so long is the most important thing in the world , but also like maybe she is incredibly dim.

“But you must go to the shop! You must see if it’s him.”

Lauren isn’t so sure about that. “And what if it’s not?”

“If it is not, you have lost nothing. He is still somewhere in the world,” Celine tells her, and Lauren knows it’s true but doesn’t know how it helps. “You may have another chance here, Lauren,” Celine tells her. “And maybe it is him and maybe it is not—maybe it is and you now have nothing in common. Maybe it is not but he is someone else you will want in your life. It is better to know.” Celine definitely looks sad now, so Lauren doesn’t ask anything further.

The next day, though, she grits her teeth and crosses the street to the bakery. She is only in Paris another month or so—she is drifting into do-or-die time. He’s there. She doesn’t know what she’d do if he wasn’t, after all this. He’s got his back to her, surveying the merchandise, so she clears her throat, and asks for, “Une batard, sil vous plait.”

He nods absently, back still turned, and grabs the loaf before turning towards her to wrap it at the counter—and drops it the remaining few inches with a dull thump, exclaiming, “Lauren!”

She must look surprised, because he says to her, “I don’t know if you remember—I am Daniel Michon,” and she laughs at the very idea that she could forget him.

“Daniel, is it?” she asks him, voice teasing, like his nervousness has completely chased hers away.

He grins back at her, slow and a little wicked. “But you can call me Bogie.”

“Because they belong together,” she responds, knows she’s skipping a line and doesn’t care.

Apparently Daniel doesn’t, either. “You’re learning,” he tells her.


End file.
